People are often shocked when I advise them NOT to open a new Facebook page or start another LinkedIn Showcase page, stating “one is enough.” But really, one is in most cases enough! It is hard enough to grow and get visibility for one page, and unless you have endless time and money, you do not need to have multiple multiple multiple pages for no reason. In this article I will explain why and also what you should be doing on your main company page so that you can optimize your posts to reach the right audiences:
Why don’t you need another company page?
Getting organic growth is actually harder than you think. Even pages with tens of thousands of followers struggle daily to get their content seen. It is no longer a game of “post and they will come.” Now you need to stand out, be engaging, be creative. I can guarantee you that if you don’t post at all, you are lost to the world. I had a client with over 100,000 followers. Their growth was wild, and viral. Some of their posts had 80,000+ likes and comments on them – I kid you not. They had funding issues at the beginning of this year and let us go, they downsized their teams to just R&D and stopped posting on Facebook altogether. From June to December last year they had 5,168 new followers on their FB page. Since January they have only had 883 new followers. In 2019 in total they had 13,679 new followers, and that was mainly due to the HUGE visibility they got, not from constant posting, but constant viral content!
So let’s for argument’s sake say you manage 2 pages. Now you must create twice as much engaging and relevant content. What is your strategy? When you start with ZERO followers how does anyone see anything? If they aren’t seeing it, do you have money to pay to play? Let’s say you are one of those “Microsoft” brands, who can start a new page and have 10,000 followers in the first month – did you know that most of your posts will only reach a very small portion of your existing following, and ONLY if they engage with it does it get seen by people outside of your following, so now you don’t only have to create content for 2 pages, you have to make it really GOOD and engaging content, so that people want to engage with it. NOW say you are neither popular nor do you have a willing gaggle of ready advocates who will all follow and engage with everything you post, do you have enough budget to “boost” or pay for a targeted audience to see your posts? If you answered NO to the above scenarios, read on to find out what you should do instead.
What should you do instead?
As you are able to geo-target by location all content on Facebook and LinkedIn, you are better off investing your time and money in bringing in a good/strong audience to your main profile so that you can simply post to your main page using audience segmentation. On LinkedIn you can even go further and segment by industry, job title, seniority etc… It means you have one really strong brand presence, but only people in that targeted audience will see the content that is relevant to them. NB: You need a minimum 300 people to be able to properly target on Linked in any specific audience, so rather spend your time and efforts bringing new followers to that main profile, so that you can utilize this feature.
Here is a short video I made that shows you how to post to LinkedIn using audience segmentation:
https://www.loom.com/share/956ef7b072d343a3ae3e610da9fa616d
When DO you need another page or profile?
If you have multiple brands and they aren’t all the same target audience, it makes sense to have a MAIN page for your company brand and showcase pages or separate FB pages for your sub-brands. For example you have multiple products, and one is B2B and one is B2C, they need different audiences AND different content. In this instance, be prepared and realistic – you need double the amount of time, effort and budget to make both successful.
When do you NOT need another page or profile?
As stated above, language or geo-location is not enough of a reason to need a separate page. Use your main page together with audience segmentation. You also 100% DO NOT need a separate page for corporate social responsibility, or careers posts, or employer brand. They are all part of your company DNA, they should be part of your main brand, just use audience segmentation. Consider starting a group or community for employer brand or corporate social responsibility. That is a better place to have it, as you do not face the same growth and algorithmic limitations of a page, it is more interactive AND you can invite people to be members.
What else could you do to be smarter at optimizing your brand visibility?
People relate to people more than to brands. Your CSR, employer brand, careers updates are better spread by employees than just your company page. Onboard and launch an advocacy program and encourage, and incentivize your employees to be your brand ambassadors. I would recommend getting a tool like Sprout Social‘s Bambu, or Oktopost it allows you to manage your social media, measure success, and run and track results of an advocacy leaderboard. Speak to me and I can make a referral and explain why you need a tool like this.
I hope this article has given you food for thought. I cannot tell you the number of clients who are struggling to strategically grow their social media following and brand presence, and they are maintaining multiple pages at the same time. If it is hard with one, it is even harder with many! Focus on one, produce quality, put some money behind it and I guarantee you will have more bang for your buck and efforts!
Good luck! Reach out if you have any questions.
